Secrets Of 90 Crore Users Are Out, As Whisper App's Data Wasn't Ever Private

The feeling of sharing a painful experience or memory with someone without experiencing any repercussions is surely golden. And things feel a lot more comfortable, safer if the listener neither knows you not you know anything about them.

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Whisper allowed just that. It let two anonymous people or groups of people talk to each other, posing as someone else and sharing their darkest memories that they want to unload off their chest or share their wildest sexual encounter that they could never share with anyone they know.

Sounds like a fun app, right? Well yes, it surely is, but now a new report has revealed that all personal data of users could be easily accessed by people online.

Personal data of users on this nearly decade-old app have been publicly available as an online database.

First brought to light by Washington Post, even though the app isn't as popular as it was when it first came out, it sees 30 million active users every month.

It was able to get into the database (before everything blew up and Whisper took them down) and was able to find around 1.3 million entries for the age group of 15 years.

While this database didn't really include the real names of the users (as Whisper allowed users to be anonymous), it included information like age, location, ethnicity, residence, in-app nickname, and membership in any of the app¡¯s groups. What¡¯s worse is that the data didn¡¯t just include currently active users but also people who have used the app in the past.

Representative Image: Reuters

According to Mathew Porter and Dan Ehrlich from firm Twelve Security, the database comprised of nearly 900 million user records -- starting from the very first day of the app¡¯s release. They¡¯re the ones who notified Washington Post, as well as to the federal law enforcement.

Medialab, the company behind Whisper, on the other hand, feels that the information was meant to be available to the public and in fact, was a feature provided by the users of the app. Moreover, they defend location sharing as a way to add authenticity to a user.